The garden this year was planned around an August bank holiday party – a farm-warming, I suppose – to welcome our friends and relations. We planted more than we needed to feed the masses: four varieties of courgette, five of squash, eight of potato and a fleet of beans and tomatoes soaring up on tripods. There have been herds of beetroot, enough salad and greens to feed the valley and flowers, too, for cutting. There are dahlias, sunflowers, calendulas, sweet peas and a growing collection of annual umbellifers to break the cacophony of colour.

As the summer filled out and the crops have tested our resolve to keep up, we have felt progressively dwarfed with sunflowers reaching skyward and squash elbowing us from the path. Each week, it has taken the best part of an afternoon to keep up with the harvesting. The sweet peas were stripped twice weekly to keep them blooming and you only had to turn your back for the courgettes to turn to marrows. They have been producing since early July, and the excess harvest has made its way on to the verge by the gate with a sign saying, "Please help yourself!"

Very little is written about the actual activity of harvesting, despite the wealth of books surrounding the subject of growing-your-own. But harvesting is an art – or at least an endurance sport. The secret is in pacing the crops in the first place so that you minimise the glut and the famine. Along with successional sowing, there are options with sowing times to help you pace the end result. An October sowing of broad beans will produce the first crop, spring sowing the second, and you can keep on sowing the peas, the beetroot and the salads at fortnightly intervals from spring through into August so that the youngest, and most succulent, are always to hand. Sowing in short rows and regularly, like a military exercise, is key.

Early, mid-season and late potatoes are further divided into groups to help you stagger cropping and storing your produce for the months ahead. Some vegetables and fruit, such as asparagus and strawberries, don't store, so choose your varieties carefully, with more than one to follow on from the next. A glut of anything can be off-putting. I could never understand why a school friend who lived on a strawberry farm didn't like the fruit, until I went there picking for pocket money. An "ever-bearer" such as the "Mara des Bois" strawberry will continue to produce little and often, while raspberries can keep you in season if you grow summer- and autumn-fruiting varieties together. My "Autumn Bliss" and "All Gold" autumn raspberries have been fruiting since July, though I'm aware that, with heavier dews and cooler nights, botrytis will get them before I do if I am not vigilant.

Raspberries freeze brilliantly straight off the bush, as do currants and gooseberries and cherry tomatoes, so it is worth making the effort to save the excess and to keep on picking with one eye on the winter. Beans and peas will need to be blanched lightly before they are committed to the freezer, while there is a wealth of storage techniques that predate such convenience. I have a book of woodcuts a friend gave me that explains how to make a root store for turnips, potatoes and the like. One day I will experiment, but this year potato sacks and a cool, dark shed will do. Don't leave the potatoes in the ground for too long however, as the ground-slugs will tunnel in to ruin the tubers.

When you have finally been overwhelmed and the courgettes have turned to marrows, I would urge a final push. Efforts now will see apples and pears juiced rather than left to rot on the ground, green tomatoes turned to chutney and the last of the raspberries and blackberries converted to jam. When the vegetable plot is shot by autumnal gales, few things are more satisfying than a well-stocked larder to brighten the darkening days ahead.

Dan's tips

Cut-and-come-again salad can be grown successfully into the winter months once a greenhouse is stripped of tomatoes. Even unheated conditions will see rocket, mustard greens and some lettuce varieties making the most of winter sunshine. Sow now while there is still a little warmth left in the sun, and keep well ventilated to avoid mildews